Tag: Writing

Please don’t tell me
that you only meant well
in my experience
meaning well doesn’t end
with a city of on fire and
a girl at the top of a
staircase leading to nothing
trying to remember where
she dropped her heart
before the chaos started
and everything was lost.

We are the ones who
fall asleep with our pens
still in our hands and
papers all around us
trying to scribble
a few worthy words
(a meagre offering to
the late-night gods of prose)
before sleep consumes us
and our transcendent ideas
become lost like pennies
tossed into the well
of unfulfilled wishes.

We said it was carpe diem
but really we were just
your average warmongers;
we took what we wanted
when it suited us and
did not think twice about
the bridges we incinerated
along the way.
The cost of every victory
from the battles of our youth
lie in the faces of people
we no longer know
in the ways we were certain
we always would.

You wake in the middle of the night and the feeling (it’s called horripilation) of your hair standing on end; the sickening tremor in your chest lets you know that you are not alone. Your eyes are opened wide but you cannot see anything in the dark. You wonder if whatever is there can see you, or if you both are cloaked in the black night. Eventually you reason with yourself, since all you can hear is your own shallow, tense breathing and the creaking of the house, that this is your imagination. As you begin to fall back into slumber, you barely but unmistakably feel something brushing the stray hairs off of your forehead. The slightest movement of air in front of your face and a chill that settles within your bones. Fear and sleep fight for control and as you lose consciousness, you wonder how many times this has happened with you forgetting as soon as the dreams claim you. How often have the ghouls let you know that they are there, and that they are not going anywhere? You remember that as a child you would wake and see figures standing against the wall, and you can still feel the terror that would follow. Your last thought before you wake in the morning, is realizing some of your longest relationships have been with the shadows that cling to your covers and taste your trembling breath.

There is nothing quite like
the feeling of your body as
your foot departs from the
rocky surface of the cliff
and your body is suspended
in the air for milliseconds-
your heart trumpeting a
perfect cadence of adrenaline
and delicious euphoria.
In that moment your thoughts
are as clear as the water that
is hastening towards impact.

I was walking alone along a path on the waterfront of Catania. I stopped at the kiosks and sifted through rows of fresh fruit and pails of snails for escargot until I was distracted by a lone man on a bench by the sea. I wandered over to him with a forgotten peach in the palm of my hand, drawn by the way he looked sketching the scenic panorama before him.

I sat next to him and watched him execute perfect strokes of lead across the page, envious of the way he could perfectly transcribe what he saw. We performed the traveller’s handshake of telling each other who we were and where we were from, and he showed me his book of sketches. Some of the drawings I recognized from the sights that lay before me but deeper into the book was a visual guide to his home in England. I gazed at expertly composed pages of streams and cottages and felt truly transported to the countryside.

He asked me what Canada was like and I, lacking his artistic skills, instead described the way that pine trees look dusted with snow, and the mountains that cradle crystal lakes between them. I detailed how my city looks split down the middle with a twisting river and deep valleys of green juxtaposed against the cold concrete of the city sky line.

He closed his eyes and said, “Ah yes, I can see it.”

There were two things that I realized in that moment:

The first being how well you can truly appreciate the beauty of home when you are miles and miles away from it. The seemingly mundane things that you would not notice in the day-to-day become features you feel compelled to describe perfectly to do the scene justice to a stranger.

The second was that everyone creates in different ways and being jealous of another’s ability to construct reality is like (as a dear friend would say) counting others’ blessings when you should be counting your own.